Wordle: It's fun, it's easy, kids love it. Here's a list of ways you might use it in your classroom or computer lab. Can you think of more? Please add them!

1. Write an all about me
2. Find out what ideas are most important in a story by cutting and pasting the text into Wordle. (The larger a word is in Wordle, the more times it was used in the text.)
3. Vocabulary Brainstorming: Give students a vocabulary word and have them brainstorm all the words associated with it.
4. Accentuate the Positive: Have all students in your class write a few positive adjectives about each of their classmates anonymously. Compile all the papers, input the adjectives for each student into Wordle, and generate a student profile word cloud to give back to the student.
5. Current Affairs Analysis: Copy and paste a news story into Wordle. What could the story have been about? Can you guess what the headline would have been? Where could have it taken place? These questions and more make this a worthy discussion exercise.
6. Wordle Word Walls: Brighten up your word walls with Wordle lessons. Students can brainstorm synonyms, antonyms, or definitions for their list of vocabulary words. Add your word clouds to your existing word wall work to help stimulate those higher thinking skills in your students. Keep a tally of the targeted vocabulary words that the children use in speech on a daily basis, and them to a Wordle cloud to show which are used most often.
7. Summarizing Skills: As a pre-reading exercise - copy/paste text of reading into a Wordle and ask students to predict what the main ideas of the reading will be.
8. Another pre-reading option: give them a Wordle of a non-fiction reading and ask them to use the Wordle to generate a title or headline before they see the real article.
9. Post-reading: Ask them to reflect on the reading based on a prompt (examples - main idea, what you've learned, funniest element, etc.) Then collect all their reflections into a Wordle.
10. Comparison Skills using Wordle: Give students two different accounts/essays on the same theme/event and let them compare the Wordles generated by each. Or you could generate Wordles for two different readings then let students see if tey can match the Wordle to it's corresponding reading.
11. Use Wordle for Classroom Polls: Have each child type favorite colors, or birthday month, favorite animal, hardest spelling word, feelings, etc. into the text part of Wordle.
12. Character Trait Analysis: Write 5 most identifiable and imprtant character traits for any character in text (assign different characters if done in reading group) Rank traits from 1-5 in order of importance/relevance to text. Type in Character name 10 times, then type in traits: most important: 5 times, next most important 4 times, and so on down to 1. Screen capture and share on a wiki or blog.
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*Wordle tips:

• Once you've created a Wordle, right click a term to remove it from the results. Wordle will re-compute without it.
• Use a tilda (~) to connect two or more words into one term (e.g., to keep Colchester School District together, enter it as: Colchester~School~District)